The Class and television in the UK Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

The Class and television in the UK - Essay ExampleOn the other hand, commercial television was to be regulated more firmly (especially in regard to advertising and content) and the game shows that had won ITV high ratings over the last few years were to have their prize monies slashed. The disparity between Pilkingtons judgements of the two channel was quite clear.This disparity was firmly and inextricably interwoven with the family structure of Britain at the time of the newspaper, and televisions place in that structure. By 1962 the working class was fit increasingly affluent, riding the post-war industrial boom and supported by the new welfare provision set apart in place by Clement Attlees reforming administration of 1945-51. Between 1951 and 1958 real wages rose by 20% (Curran, 204), this growth favouring principally the lower middle classes. This step-upd prosperity naturally converted into an increase in the number of television sets bought in 1951 there were 586,000 li cences, which grew by nearly twenty-fold to 11,659,000 (Sendall, 1982, 370). This increase was almost certainly driven by the availability of the new ITV. As well as greater prosperity for the working class, there was also increased social mobility, again due to the Attlee government and the grammar school system it had put in place in the late 1940s. An example of this new trend was a member of the Pilkington Committee itself, Richard Hoggart, who has been characterised by Andrew Crisell as a working class beneficiary of higher education and celebrated historian of popular culture. (109). I will argue that it was the personality type and, more importantly, class position, of people give care Richard Hoggard, that gave the Pilkington Report its particular tenor.One of the main reasons the BBC outperformed ITV in the Pilkington reports findings was that the report was driven by so-called Reithian values (after the first Director General of the BBC). Both bring were judged on their merits as public service broadcasting, as Sendall has said, the assumption was consistently made that entertainment needed to be balanced by a suitable residual of improving material (Sendall, 1983, 88). The viewers of television had to be improved in some way that is, television took on a good and social function. The report said so itself, the committee being quite adamant that, television is and will be a main factor in influencing the values and moral standards of our society. (Crisell, 111). Judged in this way, ITV - which was subject to market pressures in a way that the licence-fee funded BBC wasnt - was almost certain to fall short of the committees criteria. In the main, ITV produced entertainment, and all indications seemed to suggest that the mass bulk of people (mainly from the working class) watching ITV preferred this type of output to that which might improve them. However, Pilkington was less concerned with what the republican public wanted, and more with what the y should have, seeing broadcasting as a vehicle for an elite class to educate and better those moraly (which usually also means economically) beneath them, rather than a product, which is chosen by the democratic individual